Hardware

Not so long ago, I'd forego such copious virtues as stability and silence to try to squeeze every last smidgen of performance out of my computers. But alas, it would seem that for me at least, those heady days are over. In light of this, we bring you a review of Antecs offering in the ever crowded HSF market, the Jet Cool for socket A - with an emphasis on quietness, as opposed to cooling.

Who stole all the corners?

Popping open the nice clean plastic packaging of the Antec, which I must say is a refreshing change from shabby paper boxes filled with all sorts of rubbish and filings, about the first thing you notice about the Jet Cool, are the corners of the unit - or rather, lack there of.

The Antec is a quirky circular shape, and very similar to units offered by Quietpc.com - however, I have it on good authority from Mr Koolvin himself, that these two units are not identical, with a notable lack of a copper base on the Quietpc.com HSF's - If I've got that wrong, please feel free to correct me.

Continuing in its nonconformist ways, the Antec as mentioned before has a copper base, however the correct term would in fact be copper core. The cylindrical mass of copper is the height of the HSF, and falls just short of the fan. From this, 'triangular' aluminium fins span around the outside of the core. Just in case you've been on Saturn (good weather this time of year) copper is very much the 'in' thing so far as HSF's go, considering it can transfer almost double the heat of aluminium, it isn't hard to see why. Of course logic dictates that there's little point in having the ability to transfer lots more heat, when there isn't the ability to despite it (that's where larger, more powerful fans come in). As such, the most common practice is to make HSF's using both copper and aluminium.